This is Technology Bytes, episode 23 for August 13, 2023.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share my brief insights on an interesting technology.
My name is Joel.
Enjoy, and here we go.
I’m still trying to figure out what I really want this microcast to be.
I do want to share thoughts on technology, and I will continue to do that.
But exactly how I do that, and what does it entail, and what does it look like, what do I share, it’s still a little bit up in the air.
I’ve been doing another microcast called I’m Talking for 278 episodes coming this week, following on the heels of this one, or this follows on the heels of the other.
That one I’ve got really tuned in.
I’m very comfortable with it.
It’s quite short, only a few minutes, four to seven minutes maybe, but it really flows well.
And I’m still struggling on this microcast to have that same feeling after I’m done recording.
So I apologize for that and hope as we go into those hundred numbers that I’m better at what I’m trying to convey to the people who listen.
All that being said, this week I want to have a little bit of fun, I hope, and share with you some of the iOS keyboard tricks that I use, actually as I was doing some research, as some that I had forgotten about.
But there are some that are quite useful, and that unless you have seen them happen, or maybe heard someone talk about them, you might have forgotten as well.
And so I want to go through a handful, maybe two handfuls, as we go through this microcast today.
I listened to another podcast called Matt Geekabs, and they call these things quick tips, because it’s things that you do that you may not recognize that other people don’t know.
And so I just want to go through them fairly rapidly and share with you how you implement them and what they look like.
The first one I want to talk about is called Quick Path.
Now this is something that Android keyboards have had for a very long time, relatively new in the last less than handful of years.
And that’s where you actually just swipe on the keyboard from letter to letter to letter and spell out what you want to put in the document, text, notes, wherever you happen to be typing.
The cool thing is just lift your finger, put it back on the keyboard, and it knows where you’re at.
It knows you’ve started the next word, and it does work quite well.
I was surprised.
I don’t know why I use it sometimes and not others.
But it is just sliding your finger around the keyboard.
Speaking of sliding your finger, the other trick that is very, very useful and I use all the time is the trackpad feature.
When you hold the space bar on iOS, so iPhones basically is what I’m talking about, it turns that whole keyboard area into a trackpad.
You can go left and right, you can go up and down, and it moves that cursor very precisely to exactly where you need it to insert a word, delete a spelling error, whatever.
Very, very useful.
Selecting text is also sometimes a challenge on iOS keyboards, just the space itself.
But in this case, I guess I’m not necessarily talking about the keyboard, but it is part of that data entry, the keys, the letters, those kind of things.
But if you double tap a word, iOS will select that word.
If you triple tap the screen, then it will select an entire paragraph.
So that can be really useful if you want to move something, if you’re trying to delete a lot of text at one time.
It’s very difficult at times to start a selection and grab the little circle handle thing and drag it where you want to drag it.
Although you can do that as well.
But those are faster ways to select quite a bit of text at one time.
And then something, moving on to the next tip, that you can do, and I really don’t use this function at all, but it is there, and I actually forgot about this one, but once the text is selected, if you pinch together, then it will copy whatever is selected.
If you pinch again with three fingers, then it will cut that selected text.
And then if you move your cursor to another part of the screen and put your fingers together on the screen and expand them, then it will paste that copied or selected text from previous exactly where you want it to go.
I’m going to have to try to remember to use that more often.
Another thing that I actually do use quite a bit, and that is shake to undo.
So when I’ve made a mistake and I want to undo a series of letters, and I’m not exactly sure how iOS decides how far to go back, but you can just shake the phone and it will undo the last little bit of typing that you have done.
And I use that quite a bit.
One thing that I learned in preparation for this microcast is that if you take three fingers and swipe right to left, I would have thought left to right, but the function is swiping right to left, it will continue undoing for quite a bit, as if you kept hitting undo on the keyboard, that keyboard shortcut to undo in the Mac world or whatever.
But that continued action will undo as much as is in the application’s memory for what you have typed or input at that point.
Another one that I don’t use, and I’m going to need to remember, because I think that’s a pretty cool function.
Now a few tips on just typing and text entry.
One of the neat things is at the end of a sentence, you can double tap the space bar, and it will put a period and a single space for you.
And so that’s just handy so that you don’t have to try to get to the period, which is on a secondary screen from the actual text of the keyboard, I believe.
So it is very fast and it helps in that entry.
One of the other things that you can do, so I’m going to go back a little bit.
If you double tap to put the period, it will automatically capitalize the next letter.
So you don’t have to do anything because it knows that you’re starting a new sentence or at least assumes you are.
So that is a function that happens on the keyboard.
However, if you’re in the middle of a sentence and you need to capitalize something, you can hold that, so you can tap the arrow key.
Sorry about that.
You can tap the arrow key that turns the shift mode on and then tap the letter that you want.
But if you press and hold on that shift key and then just drag your finger to the letter you want to capitalize and let go, it will capitalize that letter and then turn it back to lowercase so that you don’t have to tap it twice.
Pretty cool trick.
And along with that, you can do a similar thing with the one, two, three key on the keyboard.
If you hold that and drag, you can get to a number right away.
You can get to other punctuations right away and not have to go back and forth.
It will just do that one function and then it will go back to your normal lowercase letters keyboard.
So that’s a pretty cool thing for typing as well.
Something else that you can do is if you press and hold on the letter, it will give you all of the accents for that letter for a lot of different foreign languages.
Umlauts and left accents and right accents and those kind of things.
If you hold the number keys, they do different things.
I know that if you hold the zero, you can get the degree symbol.
So if you’re writing something about temperature, those things can happen.
And then that is a function that’s pretty cool as well.
The last function I want to talk about is the autocorrect.
Oftentimes, the system will autocorrect for you and you really didn’t want it to as you’re typing.
Well, apparently, if you hit the delete key, which to me is the X with the back arrow on it on the keyboard, it will delete that entire autocorrection.
I can’t really get this one to work.
I’m going to have to play with it a little bit more, read about it a little bit more.
But I wanted to share it with you so that you could try it and see if it works for you.
Because many times, those autocorrects just are frustrating because that isn’t exactly what you wanted.
So just something to try.
I will look into it more and get back to you to see if that actually works.
So there you have a couple of handfuls of iOS keyboard shortcuts that you might want to try.
Some of them might be useful to you.
Maybe not all of them, but the ones that aren’t useful to you might be useful to somebody else.
So that’s why I included all of them because I’m not sure who’s listening.
And so I hope you enjoy and keep trying those keyboard tricks.
And if you have more that you are aware of, you can reach out to me at technologybytes, B-Y-T-E-S, at merigfamily.com, M-E-A-R-I-G family.com, and let me know.
But until then, you have been listening to the Technology Bytes microcast.
Until next time, continue enjoying your technology.
